Willem Dafoe (I)

One of the most talented actors working in film today, Willem Dafoe has worked on both Hollywood blockbusters such as Platoon and critically-acclaimed British films like Tom and Viv. On stage at the NFT, Dafoe talked with Jonathan Romney on a variety of subjects, including the joys of playing good and bad characters and the contrast between acting on stage and on screen, and also answered questions from the audience.

Jonathan Romney: What's more challenging, having a scene dangling out of a helicopter or having a scene like in Light Sleeper where it's just two of you sitting at a table?

Willem Dafoe: Same, same. Same, same. It's hard to compare because in each film you reinvent the process each time so it's really difficult to compare them.

JR: Right OK, well let's do a little bit of biography and we'll skip through chronologically. You're from Wisconsin, from a little town called Appleton which sounds incredibly wholesome, but I found out that, apparently, it's the birthplace of Senator Joe McCarthy and Harry Houdini, so which one of them do they have a statue to?

WD: Well, it was probably more like Joe McCarthy. Harry Houdini was just passing through, I think. We used to tell a joke when we were kids and we'd say you know what Houdini's greatest escape was? Actually I told that joke on a talk show once in the States and I can never go back there! It doesn't break my heart, it's ok with me!

JR: I heard also, is it true that you were kicked out of high school because you were doing some kind of experiments with raunchy video?

WD: Yes. Not raunchy. They thought it was raunchy. I thought it was interesting.

JR: What was it?

WD: Basically, I was doing a magazine show and I was going to interview three students from the student body who were all outsiders. One was a drug dealer, one was a satan worshipper and one was a nudist. So there was a lot going on in Appleton, don't get me wrong. To make a long story short, I never got to finish it because somebody came into my editing room when I went out for lunch and they saw the rough footage. Now, I never intended to show some of this stuff that I shot, but they got a little upset and when I got back the door was locked and I was told to go home. I got home and my parents called me at home and they said the school called and said you're making pornography. It wasn't true and I just moved on then.

JR: So this is the answer then - don't go for lunch until the editing is finished.

WD: Exactly.

JR: You got into theatre first, you did some work in Milwaukee and then you went on to be a part and still part of the Wooster group in New York and it's a name we've heard of a lot, it's one of those names a bit like Steppenwolf . We know that people have come out of it but we don't know exactly what kind of work goes on. So would you like to talk a little bit about it?

WD: I mean, I could talk all evening about the Wooster group. That's what I do. That's what I've been doing for the last twenty years. It's not at all like Steppenwolf which is basically a company of actors and directors doing plays. We make original work, sometimes from scratch, sometimes we'll do plays. But it's quite a bit different and we do a lot of work with film and video - live and pre-recorded video in the performances. We've performed here a couple of times. I wish we'd perform here more, perhaps we will in the future as we do a lot of international touring, but the UK doesn't seem to be a place we come to very much. Although, we're going to Belfast next week.

JR: What's the piece you're doing there?

WD: Emperor Jones, which we actually did a radio version for the BBC and I think that played this year.

JR: So, I always wonder how the stage work connects with the film work as it always seems to me that a lot of people come out of quite experimental stage work and then they go to Hollywood and then work in films that are more or less mainstream. It seems like the two roles don't entirely gel. How do you get to carry on doing work in Hollywood that actually draws on those kind of risks that you start out taking?

WD: I mix it up and I go back and forth and I think each experience informs the next and I don't find it that much different. It's more useful really to talk not so much about Hollywood and avant garde theatre as much as it's useful to talk about the differences between performing in theatre and performing on stage in film that is something we could talk about all night. But I mean, basically they are very different places, your function is basically the same, but clearly in film it's much more fragmented and it's not really the actor's medium, it's much more the director's and editor's medium where in the stage you control your rhythms much more and there's that continuity. In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you're doing a lot of reshooting which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about. In theatre you're returning to the same thing over and over again and you have to reinvest, somehow I think a lot more of you is engaged. But I love movies, so I have trouble comparing the two.

JR: Do you find it hard to adjust once you have been working in a film in that fragmented way and then you go back to the stage?

WD: It's a welcome relief, it really is. The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth - it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles.

JR: So when you started out in film, you seemed to be fated to play villains, 'cos you did The Loveless with Kathryn Bigelow and Walter Hill's rock movie, Streets of Fire. So after a couple of years Village Voice described you as "pallidly beautiful embodiment of pure evil," which is a nice thing to hear. And you've done pure evil a few times since then.

WD: Yeah, pure evil's fun. You know, as an actor, well, what, are you asking me a question?

JR: Did you think that when you started out that having played a couple of villain parts that's the path you were going to go?

WD:Actually, I was very conscious of it. In the beginning, you know, that dreaded thing of typecasting was looming over your head and I really made a conscious effort to mix it up, not because in itself it's not the job of an actor to do all different things, but for me that's what I'm interested in. You've got to be careful because you've got to work with what you have, not just for vanity's sake, but I think the best part of being an actor sometimes is the opportunity to transform yourself superficially, and deeply. So, it's true in the beginning I started playing villains and I think that's pretty clear because if you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains. And, also, it's fun to be bad and the only problem is often villain roles are devices and they lack a certain depth. They're signs, they're signals and after a little while you want something to chew on and if you function in a film it's the same too often. I think what happens is you develop a language that distances you from a certain kind of flashpoint of inspiration and creativity and you may refine that and that may be your work, but I'm not so interested in that. I think the best work comes when you're unsure, when you're terrified, when you're off balance.

JR: You have to be. After the bad guy roles you had a spell of the ultimate good guy roles, almost the Messianic parts. You played the good soldier against Tom Berenger's bad soldier in Oliver Stone's Platoon in 1986. Now Oliver Stone at that time was not really a known quantity and he went at it with all guns and he put you all through a very tough boot camp training. Did you know what to expect when you embarked on that?

WD:Well, Oliver Stone wasn't Oliver Stone then. We didn't know what to expect from him. One thing I remember when looking back on Platoon, and Platoon is a sweet story because it was a little movie that came out of nowhere. It took forever for him to try to get it made. I really thought, in those days, remember, war films were things like Rambo. So, I thought I want to do it, because I want to do it. But I thought it's commercial prospects were very low. I thought it might get misidentified and end up on the video shelf next to Kung Fu movies - I really thought that was going to happen, so I thought it was really sweet when we made an interesting film and people responded to it. As far as the preparation, I try not to have, I train myself very hard to not have expectations and I wasn't far enough in my career to have any recognisable patterns and I was going to a part of the world I had never been to before, the Philippines. And it was cool because my plane was the last plane in before the revolution, so I flew in, I took a little nap and when I woke up I opened the curtains of my room and there were tanks out in the street, and I thought, "Oh man, what's going on?" I checked out the TV and sure enough there was a revolution and I was stranded there as I was one of the first actors there and I was told that the film was not going to be happening and I couldn't leave. That was an interesting way to start the movie.

JR: But what was the boot camp like? I mean why does he do that kind of thing?

WD:Well, it depends. You do whatever you need to do to give you authority in the pretending and in this case he had a terrific stake in a certain kind of realism and a certain kind of commitment on the part of the actors. For us it was important because it helped root everything that we did. It gave us a relationship to our clothes, to our bodies, to our weapons, so all those things became automatic when you played the scene. You were living the life as much as actors can do. It was a great adventure. When you put yourself in a situation where you don't recognise yourself then you start to think differently and when you think differently it makes you much more fluid and available for pretending and you consider things that you wouldn't normally consider and whatever that takes. You know, actors are always bragging about their preparation to authenticate whatever it is they're doing. I just think you do whatever it takes to make you feel comfortable and make you feel engaged in a way that's special.

JR: Yes, the word 'pretending' is a word that actors don't often use.

WD:I'll use it 'til the cows come home! It's a word I respond to. Because the best performing is, for me, a sort of pure pretending. Performing is always a little bit of this, a little bit of that, there's no, I don't respond to any strict methodology for anything, but the one through line is the one you always go back to. I think it's a terrible cliche, but I think it's true, like when you're a kid and you say, "I'm the cop and you're the robber", and you do it and I think that activity is kind of the same. I mean you're always approached with a "what if" or "I am this guy" and it forces you to come to imagine, I mean, sort of, you have to lose yourself to find yourself and that activity reminds me most of when you're a child and you set different rules. You take a little frame of time of what is life and you change the rules.

JR: Do you research? I know you've researched some films, but it's not like a religion...

WD:You know, exactly like what I said before - it depends. I was watching Wild at Heart and I can honestly say I did nothing for that apart from show up! I know that sounds a little glib, but the truth is David Lynch gave me such a good set up, he told me this is what you're going to wear and he said "I want you to go to a dentist." I said "What?" He said, "For the teeth". Keep in mind, I'm an actor, I read the script and it says, "He's got discoloured, stumpy teeth." Now, I don't have the best teeth in the world, but I just figured they'd put a little stain on them or something. I put a limitation on myself, but the director said we're gonna get a set of full dentures for you. And when I put those dentures in, it was a mask that really set me free, because I felt different and I immediately, you know, it transformed you and it clicked off something, some childhood memory or some model from something in my life where, you really do become, so in that case I didn't find it necessary.

JR: How does David Lynch direct actors? Because there's this great mystery about him, because interviewers he tells nothing...

WD:Actors, he tells nothing... You know, most... let me be a rascal and try to demystify something about actors and directors. Most directors say very little to you and even someone like Martin Scorsese, we were working on what was basically a low budget movie and we were working very fast so I don't think I got the normal working process that Marty did, but it didn't matter because this movie had been in his head for years, but he would say very little but that's not a bad thing. He would give you such a beautiful set up that it became very clear what you had to do and his job was just to keep you on track and give you a situation so that you felt free. So David, he just makes the world very complete. In my memory, he said very little, he was just kinda smiling all the time.

JR: This sounds like the David Lynch we know.

WD:He was great, I really enjoyed working with him.

JR: So, The Last Temptation of Christ; is there any anxiety attached to playing Christ, as it's a role that no one comes to the cinema without certain preconceptions. How do you go into work in the morning and say today, "I am Christ"? I suppose a lot of actors do every day!

WD:My memory is, and I think it's very... I am really shocked to find I never thought about it. It really was a case of scrubbing myself of any expectation, particularly how the film is built and how the character functions in the film. He's a very reactive character. So it was one of those cases where I really had to make myself as available as possible to the story as it's built that way. The story works on the character and how he reacts. So, I didn't have to initiate so much as just try to be present and try to be in the scene, I didn't have to make the scene. So, my only memory is I would read the Bible, read the different accounts just to see if I could see a through line what the parallel event in the movie was. Also we were shooting in Morocco, we were really removed. There were no trailers, it was a very rough shoot, you were out in the elements. It became a deceptively physical movie and whenever you are engaged physically, everything else seems to follow. In a lot of the dialogue, not so much the scene they showed, but a lot of the dialogue, there's a lot of speeches, so I just imagine given the word.

JR: It was a very weird film to see at the time. It came as quite a shock to people as it wasn't like anyone's traditional idea of a Biblical epic. It was like a bunch of guys in Brooklyn, they could have been in a bar...

WD:His idea was, he wanted to match the divine part with the human side and part of that was finding, you know, not having a bunch of actors speaking with fine British accents!

JR: Apart from Davie Bowie.

WD:David?

JR: This was one of the films that had one of the most intense, hostile reactions. Did any of that affect you, like having religious stalkers outside your door?

WD:Yeah, well it affected me. It broke my heart because I think that it's a beautiful film and I know the spirit we made it in and in a world where you have very cynical, crass slasher movies and stuff like that, it blew my mind that somebody makes a movie about love, forgiveness, about this incredibly revolutionary character and people get nervous, but clearly then, and in retrospect, it was a political thing. The religiious Right used, I don't think they even knew what the movie was, but they used the opportunity as a chance to scare people and to galvanise their political agenda. It's very clear. From a Catholic point of view, it's a very Catholic movie and there was some artistic licences taken sometimes, but we have to do these things sometimes to make sure people are still listening.

JR: How intensely does Scorsese work on characters? We know how obsessive he gets on the visual and editing, but you tend to hear less about what he does with character?

WD:I don't know. As I said, I can't speak for... I had a wonderful time with him and I loved working on that movie, but I have no idea how Marty Scorsese works. I know how he worked on that film and that was a film he had been thinking about for many, many years. And, it was shot for like $5m (£3.4m), which was like, nothing, so we had to shoot very fast and he had all the shots in his head and it was all about problem-solving, you know, from a film standpoint. I think he did a lot of the character work in the casting. I think, I can't remember, now don't get me wrong, he really helped me and guided me a lot and I think when collaboration is good you don't know where you end and they start, but I don't remember these talks about, "Willem, come here," and then discussing the scene or discussing the intent of the scene. I just don't remember it. I guess that would be character work. I get confused about what character work is.

JR: This thing about the character work being in the casting, I guess once you decide that Harvey Keitel will be up there as Judas then it kind of defines something about the part.

WD:Right, right, but when you say character work, what do you mean exactly?

JR: I read a lot, I hear a lot about actors saying we talked about the character this way and went away for six months, or I went and worked in a bar for five years before I played the part. Maybe it's refreshing to hear that you can go on to a set without having to do that.

WD:No, don't get me wrong, I do my preparation. I just don't know character from a hole-in-the-head, I mean it's me in this particular thing and how I'm framed in the story makes the character emerge. But I don't think you can work on character unless you really have a very indicated, showy performance. I don't know, it's always a mix of things. Sometimes you have to plan ahead, sometimes you can just receive this story and try to be in the scene and something will happen for you. It depends what your function is and what the role is.